Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a big portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dial-up connection. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dial-up users is the load time of your website’s images.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site. Images that you save to your computer from a digital camera and upload to your website are almost always going to be very large and should be re-sized.
You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. This means to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.
If you do not have image editing software you can download a copy of Google’s Picasa free of charge.
